Care to expand? There was a brief period of telco (CLEC) competition, followed by a series of mergers which returned the landscape to almost the same as the one preceding the Act. If such an Act applied to social networks, how would you envision the effects?
> Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers.
Since social media are communications services, and also strongly exhibit network effects, the act could not only lower the barrier to entry, but actually create the possibility of entry (which is now virtually nonexistent for any newcomer, even if you have the money of Google).
Good point. In practice, ILECs did everything possible to delay the provisioning of interconnects, until most CLECs failed. But it was a good objective, albeit difficult to enforce. Without a physical layer monopoly (social networks), there would be less plausibility for broken interconnections.
